Every finished project comes with a potential learning curve – in other words, there is always an opportunity to learn from what went well, and what went wrong. In the project management world, these insights are called ‘lessons learned’ that serve as valuable knowledge assets when you are developing new projects or revising old ones.
At its core, this after-project special is a collaborative technique to identify, document, analyze, store, and retrieve both formal and informal project knowledge. Doing this allows you to implement process improvements, streamline workflow, and adopt best practices to ensure continued project success & organizational growth in the future.
Improving time management skills, encouraging team collaboration, and avoiding tight deadlines are some examples of lessons learned. Once discussed, written up, and communicated to all team members, these lessons can be applied in future project planning – with the basic idea being to replicate those strategies and modalities that worked well, and avoiding those that resulted in greater risk, delays, or disruptions.
Now, let’s explore our Lessons Learnt template in a bit more detail:
Project Background
In this section, you provide a brief overview of what your project was all about. Make sure to highlight your project’s scope, key deliverables, milestones, and desired outcomes. You should also mention the human and material resources available to you for executing the project.
Knowing the specific problem context your project set out to resolve allows future project teams to develop a more contextual understanding of the lessons learned and shared in the subsequent sections of the template.
Project Goals
Goals are clear, concise, and actionable statements of purpose that focus project efforts in a specific direction. They also allow other members of a team to monitor a project’s progress or performance.
In this section, you are expected to enlist the specific aims & objectives of your project, as finalized during the initial planning phase. Once you have done this, you will need to assess & comment on whether each goal was achieved or not. Preferably, your answer to this should be decisive and direct (say, a simple Yes or No) but in case your project outcomes yielded mixed or unexpected results, you are encouraged to briefly explain why this was so.
Major Accomplishments
Whether you are raising funds for a charity or launching a new product in the market – all projects are geared to achieve a specific outcome that benefits stakeholders and is rendered possible through the skills and knowledge of the project team.
In this section, you list up these key accomplishments or ‘pride pieces’ of your project. For example, the number of docu-films or public service messages you were able to disseminate or the level of revenue you were able to generate in sales. When filling out this part, avoid generic or vague statements, and try to quantify your accomplishments using relevant metrics.
Lessons Learned
Now, let’s get to the heart of the template. In this section, you identify and describe the challenges and setbacks you faced during the project’s lifecycle, from start to finish.
These could be operational challenges such as having multiple portals and systems that only facilitated one part of a multi-tiered process, a technological risk such as a cyber attack, or financial difficulties such as budget overruns. Once you have defined the challenge under the first heading (Issue 01), you need to identify the root cause of the challenge that must be addressed and its impact on the project’s overall operations, teams, and processes. In particular, discuss the impact of the challenge on a project’s scope, timeline, budget, and resources.
In the next section, you identify specific lessons you learned when dealing with this challenge. The idea here is to avoid repeating the same mistakes. For example, if your project faces challenges in terms of employee turnover or performance, the specific lesson learned will be to create better incentives for employees in the future.
In the last section, you recommend any actions or strategies you believe can result in a more robust and resilient project model in the future. These should be developed after a careful analysis of project reports as well as feedback from all project teams, stakeholders, and beneficiaries.
We have only added space for you to log two different challenges (Issue 01 and Issue 02) – however, since our template is editable as a Word file, you can simply add as many individual challenges as you need.
Action Plan
In this section, you develop a corrective or reformative action plan to implement lessons recorded in the previous section. Make sure your action plan is based on a thorough review & analysis of each challenge, its impact and the future improvements recommended by team members.
Enlist any future actions or tasks you reckon will help similar projects in the future, or benefit the organization as a whole. To ensure accountability and achievability, you should also assign each action item to a specific team or team member best suited to the job.
Let’s explain using an example. Let’s say your project faced IT-related difficulties (Issue), which resulted in customer service challenges (Challenge). The effect of this on your business is a reduced level of customer satisfaction and a slower user experience that is beginning to chip away at your net profits (Impact). In this scenario, customer feedback informs you that you need to change or replace the existing customer service software used by your company (Lesson Learnt). The Action item in this case will be ‘To replace existing software by another specific software such as Zendesk’ (Action Item).
Why You Need Our Template?
- Enables organizations to build on past successes and learn from failures.
- Facilitates the capture and dissemination of knowledge across teams.
- Helps in identifying potential risks and implementing preventive measures.
- Informs future decisions with historical data and insights.
Wrap Up
Our Lessons Learned Template is a useful tool for project managers and stakeholders to gain valuable insights based on past experiences in a systematic way that helps them enhance future project outcomes. By identifying what went well and what didn’t, you can develop actionable recommendations to tackle similar issues in future projects, enhance efficiency, and improve project delivery.
Our print-ready, free template is available in WORD, Google Docs, and PDF formats.
